What Remains
by Moonsway
Summary: Beth survives the hospital but is much different than Daryl had anticipated. I really wanted to see Daryl deal with a shockingly changed Beth. Rating might change for later chapters.


They were all dead. Daryl watched her face as he listened to her explain how she had killed them by poisoning their food. Her expression was cold and emotionless, and her voice was steady and unaffected. He remembered the image of her that had tormented him with guilt and driven his desperation to find her. Her blue eyes had been shining with the warmth that lit her from within as she smiled at him while she told him why she was writing a thank you note to the owner of the house where they had taken shelter. His heart had swelled with tenderness for her, and he'd been as careless as a besotted schoolboy when he opened the door without looking through the window first.

His mistake had cut short his happiness as walkers swarmed into the house, but he still thought that he could keep Beth safe. She'd made it out of the house but been snatched away moments before he could reach her. His helplessness as the car sped away with her was not something he could dwell on for long. He had to keep hoping that she was alive, and that he would find her. Miraculously, he had.

What he heard about Beth from Noah was better news than he could have expected. She was alive and unharmed. That cherished image of his sweet Beth had been at the forefront of his mind as they made plans to rescue her from her captors. The two cops they had convinced to cooperate with them had become agitated when Beth herself answered the walkie and wouldn't let them talk to Dawn. She claimed that Dawn and the other cops were too sick to speak to them.

"They have the same sickness we had at the prison," she told Rick over the radio.

The two cops were adamant that they wanted to see it for themselves despite Rick telling them that they needed to stay out of the quarantine zone. Daryl volunteered to go up with them. Rick reminded him that he and Beth couldn't rejoin the group until they were sure they weren't sick, but Daryl didn't care about the risks. He just wanted to be reunited with Beth.

He kept his gun trained on the cops in case they tried anything, but they were also anxious to be reunited with their own group. Beth was waiting upstairs in the hospital, and she was armed with a gun. "She's dead," she stated when the female cop asked where Dawn was. "The sickness killed her, and I made sure she wouldn't turn."

"Where's everybody else?" the blonde cop demanded.

"Dead," Beth replied. "They all died from the sickness."

"You're lying," the female cop accused. "What did you do to them? Where are they?"

She started forward toward Beth, and Beth shot her dead. The male cop shouted and rushed toward his fallen partner, and Beth took him out too. Daryl reacted too slowly due to his shock over Beth's actions, but he couldn't have done anything to stop her anyway.

"They were unarmed," he protested.

"We couldn't trust them," she said. "Okay, you can come out now!" she yelled.

She pulled a knife out and stabbed each dead cop in the head. A few people hesitantly approached from further down the hallway. "They were trapped here too," she explained.

None of them seemed too spry from what Daryl could tell by looking at them. "Noah said there's a doctor here," he prompted.

She gave him that emotionless look he would become familiar with in the coming days, but he was seeing it on her face for the first time in this moment. "He's dead too."

"The sickness?" Daryl asked with a growing unease that had nothing to do with any worry about contagion.

"No," she confirmed his suspicion. "There was no sickness."

They took the few survivors from the hospital with them, but the Beth that came out of there wasn't the same sweet girl who had been taken from him. Daryl told himself that the only thing that mattered was that he had found her again, but it broke his heart to see how much of herself she had lost.

"Did they hurt you?" Rick asked in an indirect way the question that was on Daryl's mind.

"Dawn hit me, and one of her men tried to rape me," Beth answered with no inflection of feeling in her tone.

"I'm sorry," Rick said, speaking the words that Daryl felt weren't enough to convey the depth of emotion that he felt about what had happened to her.

She appeared to be unaffected by their sympathy. "I stopped him," she stated. "He's dead."

"That's good," Rick said. "It's over now."

Daryl was glad that it was over, but he wondered how much of Beth remained behind the impassive expression he was looking upon now. She had pretended not to care after her boyfriend got killed, but her father's death had brought all her emotions to the surface. Did she truly not feel anything anymore? This was a new worry for Daryl as he contemplated the possibility that he might never feel the warmth of her gaze again.


End file.
